Tag : Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 is the label worn by the firemen on their uniforms and is the temperature at which books burn. We live in a dystopia, where reading and books are banned. Montag is a fireman and it is his job, with the aid of hypodermic needle carrying mechanical hounds, to seek out and destroy all books. He starts to question his mission and reality after encountering the seventeen year old Clarisse, a fresh-faced neighbour who has a more open outlook on life than Montag’s wife, Mildred, who, addicted to sleeping tablets, lives in a television haze, surrounded by four walls of deafening brainwash and who likes nothing more than to gossip with her friends and who manages to lose the love of her husband who is undergoing an awakening. Captain Beatty, Montag’s boss, gets suspicious when Montag calls in sick and pretty soon the firemen are calling at Montag’s house where he has hidden a cache of dissident reading material. Montag escapes and goes on the run, with the help of his only friend Faber, who has supplied him with a listening device and who is awaiting the revolution. Evading capture, Montag disappears into the countryside, only to watch the last war eradicate his former city home in a nuclear explosion, as he sets off into an existence, away from the state and where the book knowledge is kept alive. A decent book, akin to 1984 and Brave New World, the author, Ray Bradbury, explores many of the issues that damage our modern society.